We recently connected with Wesley Desrosier and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Wesley, thanks for joining us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

There are actually quite a few things we do differently at BAR Physical Therapy and intentionally so.

First and foremost, we pride ourselves on providing true one-on-one care. When someone comes to our clinic, they work directly with a Doctor of Physical Therapy for the entire session. Not a tech, not an aide, and definitely not someone without clinical education. That’s unfortunately become the norm at a lot of large corporate clinics, where patients are passed between multiple providers or spend most of their time with unlicensed staff. We’re the opposite of that.

On top of that, we offer significantly more time per visit. Most clinics give patients maybe 5 to 10 minutes with the actual PT. At BAR, our standard is a full hour of one-on-one treatment. That allows us to go deeper and create more individualized assessments, more effective interventions, and ultimately better outcomes.

We also stay rooted in evidence-based practice. There’s a lot of fluff out there right now – Techniques that are going viral on social media that just aren’t backed by science. We stay focused on what’s proven to work. That helps us get patients better faster and keeps our standards high.

Another big differentiator is how we approach workers’ compensation cases. It’s a system that unfortunately gets misused and is inefficient. We’ve built our clinic to be the solution. We specialize in treating first responders and everyday employees, and we go above and beyond: We observe our patients’ surgeries when possible, so we know exactly what they’ve been through before rehab even starts. We provide weekly updates to case managers, physicians, and employers to keep everyone on the same page. We assign patients to one consistent provider throughout the entire plan of care. The results speak for themselves: fewer unnecessary visits, quicker recovery times, and faster return to work.

We also have a fully outfitted gym that our clinic is based in, which allows us to replicate work duties and sport-specific movements. So whether you’re a firefighter, a nurse, a warehouse worker, or an athlete, we can make your rehab directly relevant to the demands of your life.

And beyond that, we treat a wide range of populations from pediatric patients to competitive athletes and we apply the same individualized, evidence-driven approach across the board.

So yes, we do things differently. And we believe that’s exactly why we’re getting better results than the industry standard.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My name is Wesley Desrosier. I am a licensed doctor of physical therapy and I am the Co-Owner of Bar Physical Therapy. I also have my certified strength and conditioning specialist cert (CSCS) and am an avid powerlifter. I have always had a passion for the medical field since I was in middle school. I just did not know what to do. Through my high school sports medicine program, internships and fantastic mentors I learned that you can actually help heal people with exercises. How great is that? So I decided to pursue physical therapy. After I graduated from my doctorate program at AT Still university in Arizona, I was told I should not start a business as a new grad and that I needed “5-10 years of experience.” So my best friend, who is also a physical therapist, and I wrote a business plan, rented our office space and started taking patients within our first year as physical therapists.

My business, BAR Physical Therapy, provides quality physical therapy services with a specialty in workers compensation cases, athletes and pediatrics. Physical therapy is a profession that is often overlooked or underutilized in the medical world. We have the ability to help a kiddo who walks pigeon toed (or intoeing) walk normally without pain or surgery to a firefighter who fell through the 1st floor to the basement of a burning building and tore his rotator cuff muscles. What truly sets our clinic apart is our 1-on-1, 1 hour care for all patients. We do not use techs or aides to squeeze patients in throughout the day.

I am the most proud of us sticking to our ethical and moral beliefs of how we serve our patients. We had a big corporate network offer us a contract who takes and gives out workers’ comp cases. However, we said no. You get such a big reduction in pay (they take more than 60% of our reimbursement) that you end up being forced to see 3-4 patients an hour just to be able to pay for the lights and your treating physical therapist which is ridiculous. So I am extremely proud of us sticking to providing quality care.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

This is actually a really fun connection. My business partner, Connor, and I went to the same physical therapy program. Throughout the 1st semester we really didn’t talk or exchange any conversation except for the occasional group project. Then one day I posted on instagram a story of how I was studying for school. It was a picture of me laying in bed watching Attack on titan on one half of my laptop screen and our power point on the other half. Connor replied to the story that he really liked Attack on titan and that he watches other nerdy anime shows too. Then, by some kind of weird chance, that next day in class my seat got taken by another student so then I ended up sitting next to Connor. We started talking about a bunch of nerdy things like One Piece and video games. From there we kept sitting by each other, studying together (which I may add were the most productive study sessions), and seeing a ton of movies at the theatres. Then one day after we watched a movie with a group of friends Connor and I were talking in the parking lot. He brought up the idea of how he did not want to work in corporate physical therapy. I agreed, and I brought up my idea of wanting to be 1-on-1 with patients. We talked until 3 in the morning. From that night our business Idea had formed and all we needed to do was finish physical therapy school.

Can you talk to us about how you funded your business?

Funding the business was partly a stroke of luck but also hard work. When we decided it was time to start our business, we were lucky in the fact that we both had the opportunity to live at home rent free. Both of our parents are not well off so this was the best they could do to help out. This allowed us to have as little personal overhead as possible. We absolutely could not have opened our clinic without both of our families’ support. Both my partner and I worked full time as staff physical therapists for quite a few months saving up money. From both of our pools of money we were able to pay the first couple months of rent at our office and have all the supplies we needed for our clinic. This allowed us to start debt-free and even to this day almost all of the money we make goes back into the clinic like getting higher quality equipment, marketing or being able to participate in charity events.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://barphysicaltherapy.net
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bar.physicaltherapy
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/BAR-Physical-Therapy/61574039477507/#
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bar-physical-therapy/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@BARPhysicalTherapy
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/bar-physical-therapy-phoenix